Background
Spencer, Elizabeth was born in 1921 in Carrollton, Mississippi, United States. Daughter of James Luther and Mary James (McCain) Spencer.
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- Works
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- Works
book
The Night Travellers (Banner Books Series)
( Elizabeth Spencer is "a master storyteller" (San Franci...)
Elizabeth Spencer is "a master storyteller" (San Francisco Chronicle), her work called "dazzling" by Walker Percy. Whether she's writing short stories or novels, Spencer is acclaimed for holding her worlds up to light and turning them to see what they reflect. The Night Travellers, set in North Carolina and Montreal during the Vietnam War years, is her most revealing work yet. Mary Kerr Harbison is a promising teenaged dancer when she meets Jefferson Blaise, an intellectual radical-in-the-making. He becomes a part of her life and over the objections of Mary's wealthy, abusive mother, her husband. But although Jeff's heart is devoted to Mary, his life is devoted to protesting the Vietnam War-at first through the public rallies, later through guerilla tactics. As Jeff is drawn deeper and deeper into the movement, he and Mary are forced to go underground and eventually move to Canada. Jeff's activities keep him on the move, and Mary, living in Montreal, struggles to raise her daughter and make a life for herself. An exploration of a dramatic period in our history, The Night Travellers is a powerful depiction of lives forever changed by political beliefs and fervidly held convictions.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1617032409/?tag=2022091-20
This Crooked Way (Banner Books Series)
( Elizabeth Spencer presents a vital, moving story set in...)
Elizabeth Spencer presents a vital, moving story set in the deep South-the Delta and Mississippi hill country. Amos Dudley was a farm boy in the Delta country at the turn of the century until he started working for his brother Ephraim in the store by the railroad. It was an ordinary enough environment in which to begin to feel the strange forces that move a man to set his course in the world. But the forces working within Amos were by no means ordinary. Sometimes cruel, sometimes suddenly tender, they were strong and willful, so that Amos became a man to reckon with-to Ary, his beautiful, plantation-born wife, to the woman in the bayou, to the shiftless philosopher, Arney. Even the rich black swamp soil which he wrested from the forest and gave to his cotton seemed to respond with awe and eagerness to Amos's will. His sensuous, wayward daughter and the man she loved especially felt the full shattering drama of the violence which had evidently been building-building in the fate of a man who, regardless, takes his own crooked way.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1617032182/?tag=2022091-20
The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (Banner Books Series)
( Elizabeth Spencer is captivated by Italy. For her it ha...)
Elizabeth Spencer is captivated by Italy. For her it has been a second home. A one-time resident who returns there, this native-born Mississippian has found Italy to be an enchanting land whose culture lends itself powerfully to her artistic vision. Some of her most acclaimed work is set there. Her American characters encounter but never quite wholly adjust to the mysteries of the Italian mores. Collected here in one volume are Spencer's six Italian tales. Their plots are so alluring and enigmatic that Boccaccio would have been charmed by their delightful ironies and their sinister contrasts of dark and light. Spencer is grounded in two bases-Italy and the American South. Her characters too, mostly Southerners, rove in search of connection and fulfillment. In The Light in the Piazza (a novella which has become both Spencer's signature piece and a Hollywood film) a stranger from North Carolina, traveling with her beautiful daughter, encounters the intoxicating beauty of sunlit Florence and discovers a deep conflict in the moral dilemma it presents. "I think this work has great charm," Spencer has said, "and it probably is the real thing, a work written under great compulsion, while I was under the spell of Italy. But it took me, all told, about a month to write." In Knights and Dragons (another novella and a companion piece to The Light in the Piazza) an American woman in Rome and Venice struggles for release from her husband's sinister control over her. Spencer sets this tale in the cold and wintry dark and here portrays the other face of Italy. In "The Cousins," "The Pincian Gate," "The White Azalea," and "The Visit," Spencer shows the exceptional artistry that has merited acclaim for her as one of America's first-class writers of the short story.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0878058370/?tag=2022091-20
The Voice at the Back Door (Voices of the South) (Paperback) - Common
(Jahresbericht Des Koniglichen Realgymnasiums Mit Hoherer ...)
Jahresbericht Des Koniglichen Realgymnasiums Mit Hoherer Handeisschule in Zittau Fur Das Schuljahr Ostern 1895 Bis Ostern 1896 (1896)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FBBKMWE/?tag=2022091-20
The Night Travellers
(Set in the 1960's, The Night Travelers, portrays America ...)
Set in the 1960's, The Night Travelers, portrays America under the shadow of the Vietnam War and the counterculture that developed in opposition to the war. The characters reflect a time when often violent pressures affected the American community and family life. Kate Harbison is a socially ambitious scientist whose life revolves around her work, which includes testing chemical weapons on animals for the military. Kate's daughter, Mary, who cares little for social distinction, falls in love with Jeff, an antiwar activist. Mary and Jeff's life involves traveling at night on the run to escape the draft by crossing the border into Canada. Ultimately, the story reveals that only death can destroy the ties that bind.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670839159/?tag=2022091-20
Fire in the Morning
( Admirers of Elizabeth Spencer's writing will welcome ba...)
Admirers of Elizabeth Spencer's writing will welcome back into print her first novel, and her new readers will discover the sources of her notable talent in this book. Published in 1948 to extraordinary attention from such eminent writers as Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter, this father-and-son story revolves around an old southern theme of family grievances and vendettas. Fire in the Morning recounts the conflict between two families extending over two generations up to the 1930s.The arrival of an innocent stranger flares old arguments and ignites new passions. In Spencer's compelling tale of the half-forgotten violence, the well-deep understanding of father and son, Kinloch Armstrong, the young hero, confronts mysteries of the past. His wife, a newcomer to the area and its legacies, makes friends with a family of traditional rivals. After she is involved in a nighttime wreck and the death of a local man, the past gradually comes to light, and the two families once again become caught up in revelations, hatreds, and conflicts. Spencer faithfully renders the setting-a small, dusty Mississippi town-and the surrounding countryside as it was in the early twentieth century.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0380701057/?tag=2022091-20
The Light in the Piazza (Penguin Short Fiction)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140087125/?tag=2022091-20
Ship Island and Other Stories. Signed/LTD.
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The Voice at the Back Door: A Novel (Voices of the South)
( In the mid-1950s, the town of Lacey in the Mississippi ...)
In the mid-1950s, the town of Lacey in the Mississippi hill country is a place where the lives of blacks and whites, though seemingly separate, are in fact historically and inevitably intertwined. When Lacey's fair-haired boy, Duncan Harper, is appointed interim sheriff, he makes public his private convictions about the equality of blacks before the law, and the combined threat and promise he represents to the understood order of things in Lacey affects almost every member of the community. In the end, Harper succeeds in pointing the way for individuals, both black and white, to find a more harmonious coexistence, but at a sacrifice all must come to regret. In The Voice at the Back Door, Mississippi native Elizabeth Spencer gives form to the many voices that shaped her view of race relations while growing up, and at the same time discovers her own voice -- one of hope. Employing her extraordinary literary powers -- finely honed narrative techniques, insight into a rich, diverse cast of characters, and an unerring ear for dialect -- Spencer makes palpable the psychological milieu of a small southern town hobbled by tradition but lurching toward the dawn of the civil rights movement. First published in 1956, The Voice at the Back Door is Spencer's most highly praised novel yet, and her last to treat small-town life in Mississippi.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080711927X/?tag=2022091-20
Starting Over: Stories by Spencer, Elizabeth (2014) Paperback
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The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (Banner Books) Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004TLPO66/?tag=2022091-20
The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (Banner Books Series) by Spencer, Elizabeth (1996) Paperback
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010MZI54U/?tag=2022091-20
The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140064362/?tag=2022091-20
Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140122524/?tag=2022091-20
Fire in the Morning (Banner Books Series) by Spencer, Elizabeth (2012) Paperback
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00YTJYDLU/?tag=2022091-20
The Voice at the Back Door (Voices of the South) by Spencer, Elizabeth (1994) Paperback
(Reprint)
Reprint
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010MZN8QA/?tag=2022091-20
By Elizabeth Spencer Starting Over: Stories Paperback
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00Q4FZ4KG/?tag=2022091-20
No Place for an Angel: A Novel
( Hailed as Elizabeth Spencer's best novel (Michael Gorra...)
Hailed as Elizabeth Spencer's best novel (Michael Gorra, New York Review of Books), this lost masterpiece of midcentury America traces the decline of the fortunate and the search for redemption in Kennedy-era America. Winner of five O. Henry Awards and the 2013 Rea Prize for Short Fiction, Elizabeth Spencer has long been considered a master of the short story, yet her novels are no less a showcase for her uncanny ability to depict how "twisted, chafing, inescapable, and life-supporting" (Alice Munro) the ties that bind families and marriages are. Nowhere are these skills more evident than in her fourth novel, No Place for an Angel, a Jamesian portrait of Cold War America that follows two fracturing marriages—Catherine and Jerry Sasser, a Texas heiress and a ruthless political fixer, and Irene and Charles Waddell, a worldly pair involved with American policymaking in Italy—as they cross paths from the oil fields of Texas to Rome and New York. Witty, mordant, but above all deeply perceptive of the secret emotional worlds of her characters, Spencer portrays the limitless ambition of the postwar world, the soaring rise of her characters, and, finally, their diminishing fortunes, which lead to smaller but firmer destinies.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/163149063X/?tag=2022091-20
This Crooked Way THIS CROOKED WAY by Spencer, Elizabeth (Author ) on Dec-01-1952 Paperback
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AVF5UOA/?tag=2022091-20
This Crooked Way (Voices of the South)
(A former farm boy in the Deep South, Amos Dudley rises to...)
A former farm boy in the Deep South, Amos Dudley rises to power through an appetite for cruelty and domination in a tale which Eudora Welty said, "More than fulfills...natural expectations aroused by Fire in the Morning."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807125695/?tag=2022091-20
Ship Island and Other Stories
(NY 1968 1st (stated). Mississippi writer. Hardcover. Octa...)
NY 1968 1st (stated). Mississippi writer. Hardcover. Octavo, 175pp., cloth. VG in Good DJ, some edge wear. Jacket reinforced with tape on inside.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0070601828/?tag=2022091-20
Landscapes of the Heart: A Memoir (Voices of the South)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080712916X/?tag=2022091-20
The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (Banner Books Series) Paperback - March 1, 1996
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010EV9RBM/?tag=2022091-20
Nouvelles du Sud (The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/2743600683/?tag=2022091-20
- The Salt Line ("Spencer's refined, sensuous writing and laser ...)
- The Light in the Piazza/Half Angel/A Sense of Values/Warpath/Marnie (Reader's Digest Condensed Books, Volume 1: 1961) (Vol. 1, Winter, 1961 Selections. Hardcover w/o dust jacke...)
Elizabeth Spencer
Edit ProfileEducation
Bachelor, Belhaven College, 1942. Master of Arts, Vanderbilt University, 1943. Doctor of Letters (honorary), Southwestern University at Memphis, 1968.
Doctor of Laws (honorary), Concordia University at Montreal, 1988. Doctor of Letters (honorary), University of the South, 1992. Doctor of Letters (honorary), University North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1998.
Doctor of Letters (honorary), Belhaven College, 1999.
Career
Instructor Northwest Mississippi Junior College, 1943-1944, Ward-Belmont, Nashville, 1944-1945. Reporter The Nashville Tennessean, 1945-1946. Instructor University Mississippi, Oxford, 1948-1951, 52-53.
Visiting professor Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 1976-1981, adjunct professor, 1981-1986. Visiting professor University North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1986-1992.
Achievements
Works
book
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No Place for an Angel: A Novel
( Hailed as Elizabeth Spencer's best novel (Michael Gorra...)
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The Voice at the Back Door: A Novel (Voices of the South)
( In the mid-1950s, the town of Lacey in the Mississippi ...)
-
Fire in the Morning
( Admirers of Elizabeth Spencer's writing will welcome ba...)
-
This Crooked Way (Voices of the South)
(A former farm boy in the Deep South, Amos Dudley rises to...)
-
The Night Travellers
(Set in the 1960's, The Night Travelers, portrays America ...)
-
The Voice at the Back Door (Voices of the South) (Paperback) - Common
(Jahresbericht Des Koniglichen Realgymnasiums Mit Hoherer ...)
-
The Night Travellers (Banner Books Series)
( Elizabeth Spencer is "a master storyteller" (San Franci...)
-
The Salt Line
( "Spencer's refined, sensuous writing and laser insights...)
-
This Crooked Way (Banner Books Series)
( Elizabeth Spencer presents a vital, moving story set in...)
-
The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (Banner Books Series)
( Elizabeth Spencer is captivated by Italy. For her it ha...)
-
Ship Island and Other Stories
(NY 1968 1st (stated). Mississippi writer. Hardcover. Octa...)
-
The Voice at the Back Door (Voices of the South) by Spencer, Elizabeth (1994) Paperback
(Reprint)
-
The Light in the Piazza/Half Angel/A Sense of Values/Warpath/Marnie (Reader's Digest Condensed Books, Volume 1: 1961)
(Vol. 1, Winter, 1961 Selections. Hardcover w/o dust jacke...)
- The Light in the Piazza (Penguin Short Fiction)
- Ship Island and Other Stories. Signed/LTD.
- Starting Over: Stories by Spencer, Elizabeth (2014) Paperback
- The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (Banner Books) Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
- The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (Banner Books Series) by Spencer, Elizabeth (1996) Paperback
- The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer
- Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories
- Fire in the Morning (Banner Books Series) by Spencer, Elizabeth (2012) Paperback
- By Elizabeth Spencer Starting Over: Stories Paperback
- This Crooked Way THIS CROOKED WAY by Spencer, Elizabeth (Author ) on Dec-01-1952 Paperback
- Landscapes of the Heart: A Memoir (Voices of the South)
- The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (Banner Books Series) Paperback - March 1, 1996
- Nouvelles du Sud (The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer)
-
No Place for an Angel: A Novel
Membership
Member American Academy Arts and Letters, Fellowship of Southern Writers (charter. Vice chancellor 1993-1997).
Connections
Married John Arthur Blackwood Rusher, September 29, 1956.
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Born
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Nationality
American
Awards
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Named to North Carolina Hall of Fame, 2002. Recipient Women's Democratic Committee award, 1949, recognition award, National Institute Arts and Letters, 1952, Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation award, American Academy Arts and Letters, 1957, Fortner award for literature, 1998, Award of Merit medal for the short story, 1983, 1st McGraw-Hill Fiction award, 1960, Henry Bellamann award for creative writing, 1968, Salem award for literature, 1992, Dos Passos award for fiction, 1992, North Carolina Governor's award for literature, 1994, Corrington award for literature, 1997, Richard Wright award for literature, 1997, award for non-fiction, Mississippi Library. Association, 1999, Brooks medal, Fellowship of Southern Writers, 2001, Thomas Wolfe award for literature, 2002, William Faulkner award for literature excellence, 2002, Mississippi Governor's award for excellence in the arts, 2006, Pen/Malamud award for short fiction, 2007, Lifetime Achievement award, Mississippi Institute Arts & Letters, 2009. Fellow, Guggenheim Foundation, 1953. Kenyon Review fellow in fiction, 1957, Bryn Mawr College Donnelly fellow, 1962, National Endowment for Arts grantee in literature, 1983, Senior Arts Award grantee, National Endowment for the Arts, 1988.Named to North Carolina Hall of Fame, 2002. Recipient Women's Democratic Committee award, 1949, recognition award, National Institute Arts and Letters, 1952, Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation award, American Academy Arts and Letters, 1957, Fortner award for literature, 1998, Award of Merit medal for the short story, 1983, 1st McGraw-Hill Fiction award, 1960, Henry Bellamann award for creative writing, 1968, Salem award for literature, 1992, Dos Passos award for fiction, 1992, North Carolina Governor's award for literature, 1994, Corrington award for literature, 1997, Richard Wright award for literature, 1997, award for non-fiction, Mississippi Library. Association, 1999, Brooks medal, Fellowship of Southern Writers, 2001, Thomas Wolfe award for literature, 2002, William Faulkner award for literature excellence, 2002, Mississippi Governor's award for excellence in the arts, 2006, Pen/Malamud award for short fiction, 2007, Lifetime Achievement award, Mississippi Institute Arts & Letters, 2009.
Fellow, Guggenheim Foundation, 1953. Kenyon Review fellow in fiction, 1957, Bryn Mawr College Donnelly fellow, 1962, National Endowment for Arts grantee in literature, 1983, Senior Arts Award grantee, National Endowment for the Arts, 1988.